BBC bias flows from the top of the corporation. Lord Patten, the chairman of the trustees – that body that supposedly polices and enforces impartiality- is a foaming-at-the-mouth Europhile, as this interview shows. And now it has been revealed that Diane Coyle, his deputy – a fatcat quangocrat and former Indy financial journalist cosily married to BBC reporter Rory Cellan Jones – has accepted a role as advisor to the shadow business secretary and climate change zealot Chuka Umunna. According to the reports, this is despite being told by trust director Nicholas Kroll that such work would be a “conflict of interest”.
The real scandal goes much deeper. It defies belief that Ms Coyle was appointed to her role at all…because in her case a leopard does not change its spots. Without doubt, Ms Coyle shares Lord Patten’s unmoderated enthusiasm for the EU. She wrote in the Independent in 1999:
The defenders of sterling are, in the main, a group of elderly men with more stake in their past than in our future. They clothe their gut anti-Europeanism and Little Englandism in the language of rational economic argument (quoted in Peter Oborne’s Centre for Policy Studies booklet The Guilty Men)
.
Also according to Mr Oborne, the following year, Ms Coyle was equally vehement in her dismissal of the idea that an inflationary boom in Ireland was caused by the euro. She maintained that it was Eurosceptics who supported such views .
Ms Coyle also supports the EU in its lunatic climate change-related policies. This is evident in a book she wrote in 2011, The Economics of Enough. This is an interview she gave about her work:
Diane Coyle, author of The Economics of Enough, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the future and the ideas in her book. Coyle argues that the financial crisis, the entitlement crisis, and climate change all reflect a failure to deal with the future appropriately. The conversation ranges across a wide range of issues including debt, the financial sector, and the demographic challenges of an aging population that is promised generous retirement and health benefits. Coyle argues for better measurement of the government budget and suggests ways that the political process might be made more effective
Ms Coyle shares with Lord Patten yet another cosy – and no doubt highly lucrative – climate change, love-the-EU role. She sits with him as an advisor to EDF Energy. And EDF is one of greedy, grasping power companies that tells monstrous porkies about climate change in order get as many subsidies into its fat maw as it possibly can.
The issue here is beyond parody. Ms Coyle is an EU-loving, Labour luvvie who has spent her life nakedly pushing her political views. That she is a trustee at all is a disgrace – and confirms yet again that the corporation is rotten to the core.
Great post Mr Hornbury, but as one more guilty than most of typos, it should be ‘dyed in the wool’.
“Great post Mr Hornbury, but as one more guilty than most of typos…”
Sorry, couldn’t resist hippie.
I’m sure most have probably seen the article in the Mail today about the latest climate change scam. Anyone want to bet the BBC will as usual ignore it?
You are not really surprised, Robin?
Almost every trustee, director, non-executive committee member of every quango, primary care trust, charity is a political animal of some sort. Every public institution, it seems, has been politicised and it has become increasingly noticeable over the last decade.
The media, politics and public administration are three cheeks of the same mutated arse.
Jeremy,
Quite right and almost all of them Lefties !
In a rational world this would be an open and shut case. Coyle & Patten are unsuitable to be heading a body overseeing a supposedly impartial organisation. End of.
That they are not, and openly supported by all parties, demonstrates the depths of corruption and cronyism in the system.
Mass boycott of the licence fee now. It’s the only way.
I don’t see whay ANYONE who objects to the bbc gives them one single cold penny…….
“Phil Harrold, BBC Trust Head of Governance, which advises trust members on all matters relating to their jobs, told Mr Kroll: ‘This could potentially be a significant partisan political activity.’”
(Mail on Sunday)
Well duh!
This looks completely indefensible, scandalous even. Despite the BBC’s own reservations, it seems she just went ahead and started advising the Labour Party. How on earth can she justify this? How can the BBC justify it?
And she’s been doing it since February, and yet this is the first the world knows about it?
She gets £77,000 a year for 2 days a week “work” for the BBC Trust ?
Crazy.
Corruption, pure and simple. The UK has sunk to the level of an African State. And this is just one example of a “system” which is rotten through and through.
The hip bone connected to the thigh bone…”
I still think we should draw up a BBC genealogy chart seeing all these family and business connections up front. Anyone? (dotted lines ofr mistresses)
Great idea, Louis. The dense, tangled, beeboid Tree of Nepotism, and the bloated, bitter fruit it sustains. I expect my licence fee to pay for good programmes, not line the pockets of leftoid wankerinas like Coyle. This particular case stinks to high heaven – utterly shameless. Cases like this, & the travesty of the News/Current Affairs Dept’s blatant bias, convince me it’s time to take a chainsaw to large branches of the corporation’s tree & get back to quality, like last week’s Bletchley Park/Lorenz cipher machine programme. Programmes that celebrate Britain’s achievements, not bury them. £77,000 a year for 2 days a week? A nice little earner for a nauseating professional parasite. Cut these leeches off our backs.
Who voted for any of this lot of loons?
If it`s my BBC, where then is MY small shareholder option to award their pay hikes and perches from which they can shit on the rest of us…they call them jobs, but we know that they are perches.
The Beeb are in really dangerous territory with all this…if they want the banks and FTSE types to be held to account by their shareholders…how come we “stakeholders” in the collective love-in/lock out that is NewLabour/GreenSleaze and the liblab axis that is the Guardian-BBC-how come WE get no say in Fatty Pattens chioce of cabals for hire?
Rather Thatcher than Dachas for the likes of these massage parlour kings and queens who grease the public windpipe at out expense.
Running dogs of privilege…well, waddling and wobbling to the next rickshaw stand at least!
The thing is where is the right wing press on this? They remain silent, the Murdoch press in particular you’d think would really be going after the scum and dross at the BBC.
But nothing, unfortunately outside of blogs on the internet most of our press are all in it together. Far too chummy for my liking, they claim thier job is ot hold the executive to account, yet they don’t turn thier attention to each other (unless it’s the Murdoch press getting attacked) but give each other for the most part a free pass.
Where is the investigation into the affairs of beeboids who are linked to pro climate change groups?
What concerns me is that ITV/Sky and most of the press don’t have proper journalists with a science background who can challenge the crap pumped out by the BBC.
I do believe it has started to sink in across the MSM.
Can’t speak for the ‘wingist nature, but whilst there are some publications who seem to be less keen to acknowledge this story at a time of grotesque executive remueration they did get excited about (mainly in the private sector, which is really none of their business, as opposed to the public, which should be), there are others who are pointing out, purely on a factual basis, that £77k is a fair old crack for a few days a week, especially in service of a less than unconflicted client base.
Especially given the oddly nepotistic nature of it all… again… when scholars of hypocrisy may recall the outrage and ‘questions asked’ when others, not as unique as the BBC, were sharing the love… and largesse.
The BBC along with the rest of Jersey’s State Media are complicit http://voiceforchildren.blogspot.com/2011/10/state-media-awards-and-blogs.html
The BBC spent money and time doing a lenghty documentary-ish piece on chikd abuse in Texas, but ignore what’s going on in their own backyard.
As I said on that David we have a lot of abuse by Muslim men be it sending their own 14 year old daughters off to Pakistan to be raped and married or the grooming of white girls to also rape.
On this matter the BBC is zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Quite correct Martin, but i guess the real reason is silly, white, guardianasta ‘wimmin’ like Coyle like the black man’s hampton, think it is ‘right on’ and cool. That or they are dykes. The BBC are stuffed to the gunwhales with gays, sexual deviants, drug addicts, inter-racial breeders, kiddie fiddlers and so on. ‘Enlightened’ people indeed.
As a supplement to Robin H’s insightful article, here’s an extract from an article which Jeff RANDALL, who once worked at the monopolistic public broadcasting corporation, but who now works at ‘SKY NEWS’ and writes here at ‘Telegraph’ (a month ago):-
“As my Daily Telegraph colleague Peter Oborne explains in his report for the Centre for Policy Studies, Guilty Men, Greece’s calamity and the unravelling of the euro zone are hugely embarrassing for the soi-disant intellectuals who urged the United Kingdom to abandon sterling for the euro. I still marvel at a paper, Why Britain Should Join The Euro, written in 2002 by Richard Layard (London School of Economics), Willem Buiter (Citigroup), Christopher Huhne (Energy Secretary), Will Hutton (ubiquitous Left-wing commentator), Peter Kenen (Princeton University) and Adair Turner (former director-general of the CBI).
“It asserts: ‘Opponents of the euro have forecast disasters which have in fact never happened and which always looked most unlikely… Euro-sceptics constantly underestimated the competence of Europeans and their ability to organise things properly.’
“What, like allowing Greece to fiddle its entry form?
“Euro-fanatics are not alone in being routed by the debacle in Athens.”
-It could be added that Will HUTTON (see above) sees himself as an arch enthusiast for the continuation of the BBC-NUJ’s publicly financed monopoly broadcasting powers, preferably with himself as next Director General.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeffrandall/8788501/Eurozone-crisis-there-are-no-miracles-in-Greek-tragedies.html
Utterly astonished to find Layard, Turner and Hutton still shamelessly whoring themselves around the BBC studios, as if their track record on the Euro actually gives them a duty to tell the rest of us how best to deal with the crises we`re facing.
Each and every one of these three gets hushed and reverential tones from the BBC and the broadsheets as they hold forth on …happiness(Layard) incomes(a well-padded Hutton!) and any manner of enquiries into maladministration(Turner).
Staggering in their shamelessness, incompetence and mealy-mouthed squirmings…which is ,of course: why the BBC and the clever smoothie chops types use these grease guns for hire.
As for Huhne…last heard wanting only electric cars to be permitted to do 80mph?…bet he wished he`d thought of that for himself a few years back!
Is anyone going to tell him anything about the speeds of electric cars then?…
With people like this as cancer and weevils in the body politic…we haven`t got a prayer!
Not that the EU or Harriet would let them suggest one, even if they knew what one was!
Well said, cj !
Will Hutton especially is utterly useless, he gets everything wrong , but still gets his £150K pa plus from some Left-wing think tank, “The Work Foundation”. Well, it certainly works for him. God only knows how much the BBC pays him on top of that.
Dez/ Scottie,
Any thoughts on the posts above ?
Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague
Oops, looks like somebody will be working overtime at the BBC to hide this story.
I think that it was Jim Rogers that mentioned the BBC Book that the likes of Evan Davis were using against him!
Having heard both Evan and the Beeboid who was defending the salaries of the Trusteee/Grandees(Feedback in the latter case)…I think the word “perceptions” seeems to be getting lobbed in whenever the salaries and excesses at the BBC are mentioned.
Both Evan and this Claire McCringer popped it in when a listener or guest said that these scandals went on…to the Beeb, these are mere perceptions…and Specsavers might be able to help us callow jealous nitpickers!